A Guide to the Essex Elms
A glance at pages 279-282 of R. H. Richens' book, 'Elm' (1983), reveals fully the arcane
complexities of elm classification. These pages list dozens of now redundant names and
synonyms. They are testament to the continuing success of the elms in baffling and defying the
attempts of learned taxonomists to classify them. In a country whose flora has been so well
studied, it is astonishing to find a group of higher plants which is still such a great source of
contradiction and uncertainty amongst experts.
Pteleologists, elm specialists, still don't agree (apart from Wych Elm) on whether a particular
elm constitutes a good species, a hybrid or merely a variety. Some elms which are clearly very
different, but are united in possessing some shared morphological characters, are 'lumped'
together under one name, forming a very heterogeneous group, but not an easily defined species.
The two elm specialists working this century, Ronald Melville and R. H. Richens character-
istically failed to arrive at a consensus on how to identify and name elms. They also held widely
differing views on the origin of our elms. Melville listed just six species and eleven hybrids;
Richens lists some forty types of elm, including species and hybrids (Rackham, 1986).
Rackham (1986) used a rationalised version of the Richens' classification in order that a name
can be put to a particular elm species or that an elm can be assigned to a particular group. I have
followed this method as a convenient way of giving a name to a particular category of elm found
in Essex.
The actual names given to elms have led to much confusion. The Wych Elm of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is not the tree we know as Wych Elm today. In Table 1 I
have listed the species or groups of elms listed in various publications concerning Essex elms
and their equivalents.
To take one elm, East Anglian Elm (Ulmus minor) (probably a diverse group of elms), in
pre-Linnaean times this was the Ulmus folio glabro, the Witch Elme, as described by Thomas
Johnson in Gerard's Herbal in 1633. It was described as being very plentiful between Romford
and Stubbers (near Cranham) 'intermixed with the first kinde' (English Elm, Ulmus procera)
(Wilkinson, 1978). 140 years later Richard Warner, the celebrated Woodford Botanist, de-
scribed it as the smooth leaved or Wych Elm, again identifying it as the Ulmus folio glabro (the
elm with glabrous, or hairless leaves). G. S. Gibson, in the Flora of Essex 1862, described it as
the Smooth-leaved Elm (Ulmus glabra Sm.), using the specific name we now use for Wych Elm
(Ulmus glabra Huds.). Three later publications list it as Ulmus carpinifolia (R. H. Richens,
1967, S. T. Jermyn, 1974 and R. M. Burton, 1983) although Rodney Burton hinted at its
taxonomically more correct designation of Ulmus minor Mill., the name under which it is listed
by Rackham (1986). In 350 years this elm has gone from Ulmus folio glabro - Ulmus glabra -
Ulmus carpinifolia - Ulmus minor, the latter being the name it was described under in 1768.
The different authors are in all probability discussing different members of the East Anglian
Elm group.
In this guide to Essex elms I have added the diagnostic features of the species or group
involved, and some comments on their distribution in Essex, much of which is taken from
Richens (1967). I have included six pages of leaf silhouettes, representative of the species or
groups of elms involved (see p. 13 to 18).
Wych Elm (Ulmus glabra Huds.)
A broad spreading tree with trunk forking with a ' Y' in mature specimens.
The leaves are very large, broad, very rough (scabrid) to the touch with an extremely short
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